Publishing, fast and slow

What my first blunder taught me about the book trade

This week’s recommendations

There’s an island of Ireland theme. Taken together, these books form a guide to the history and culture of a place so close to Britain yet so often misunderstood.

• I’m reading: These Days by Lucy Caldwell. Set during the Belfast Blitz of 1941, this new novel tackles domestic relationships in the darkest of times.

• Recently loved: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. The most compelling - and accessible - portrait of the Troubles I have read. Impressively researched yet novelistic

• Golden oldie: At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O’Neill. A coming-of-age novel that unfolds in the 1910s, in tandem with Ireland’s republican movement. Gorgeous dialogue. Lots of (gay) sex: you have been warned! 

  Please click on the links above to buy any of these books from Backstory via Bookshop.org 

The most stressful days of my life began with a convivial chat with a kindly man named Richard Preston. Now marshalling op-eds at The Times, he used to edit the Telegraph’s “comment front”, a 1,500-word piece analysing the issue of the moment. He would amble over at about 11am and say things like “we should do something about energy”. Six hours later - and now, of course, a world expert on the energy markets - you would hand in your magisterial take for the next day’s paper. I once had to answer whether or not Scientology qualified as a religion. Not remotely litigious, Scientologists. 

Which is to say that if news happens fast, so do newspapers. Even though I am now accustomed to the sometimes slower pace of magazine journalism, a call from an unknown number still makes me quake lest it somehow be my old news editor, demanding my assessment of the mood on the ground in a city hundreds of miles away before the paper hits the presses.

So I am in for quite the adjustment. If newspapers represent publishing at its quickest, I am discovering that the book trade is, er, somewhat more leisurely. Putin’s People - arguably the timeliest book in publishing right now - was out of stock at the industry’s main wholesaler (where indies source their customer orders) for most of this week. When I recommended it in last week’s email, I naively assumed that plenty of copies would be available. By the time many of you tried to order it, there were none. Rookie error no 1! I’m very sorry. (While I’m at it I gave the wrong link to buy My War Gone By, I Miss it So by the war correspondent Anthony Loyd. This is the right link. Sorry.)

The good news is that it is now back in stock and, if you haven’t already received yours, you should very soon. But it has taught me a valuable lesson: the book trade has a very different definition of “fast” to the newspaper business. That Putin’s People was out of stock for only a week was probably pretty good for an industry that generally commissions books years in advance and will often take days or even weeks to deliver new print runs to bookshops. In newspapers, a delay of even a day often kills a story. 

Publishers do sometimes act fast. When a very famous person dies, a slew of updated or entirely new biographies will hit the shelves PDQ. And, at the popular end of the market, there can be a powerful commercial incentive to respond quickly to buzz. I once interviewed a writer who made serious money bashing out “bucketloads” of such books, often ostensibly by a celebrity who had just won some reality show or other. His writing record was 20 days from start to finish. 

Mostly, though, it’s a different pace. It will often take a year or so for a writer to find an agent and submit her proposal (perhaps 30 pages, for a non-fiction book). Then the publisher might um and ah for another few months, before giving the writer a year or so to do her thing. Even then, the publisher will often sit on a manuscript for a year before publishing the hardback. Then it’s another year before the paperback and sometimes even longer for foreign translations. So spare a thought for a writer who seems a bit bored at a book talk: she might have been blathering on about it for a decade! 

The trick, then, is to anticipate future demand. For publishers, it’s about what will be hot in three years’ time. For booksellers, what you’ll be selling in three months. And, when a book starts going wild, re-order while you still can! First lesson learned.

More next week. In the meantime, please do share this with any friends who might like it and get in touch with any comments or ideas. If you hit reply, it comes straight to my inbox. 

Tom

The critics love

• My Pen is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women. An anthology by 18 Afghan writers that “depicts the resilience, stoicism and humanity of Afghan women” (The Economist). 

• God is Dead: The Rise and Fall of Frank Vandenbroucke, Cycling’s Great Wasted Talent by Andy McGrath. A “shocking, clear-sighted and sympathetic account” of “the George Best of cycling, a mesmerising talent from a humble background who self-destructed in public” (The Times).  

• Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti. A mix of fiction, essay and memoir set in an Italian American neighbourhood of New York and southern Italy. “At its heart is the story of Durastanti’s charismatic parents, both deaf, who came to America from Italy, only to return.” (The New Yorker) 

You’re buying

You can order pretty much any book from Backstory via Bookshop.org. Just put a title into the search bar here. These are some of the books you bought this week. Thank you.

• Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher by John Davis. “Lively and colourful” portraits of life in the capital in the Sixties and Seventies, from Soho to suburbia.

• Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre. The John le Carré of non-fiction tells “the true story of the Second World War’s most extraordinary spy”.

• One: Pot, Pan, Planet: A Greener Way to Cook for You and Your Family by Anna Jones. How to cook “quickly, sustainably and stylishly”.